Leslie Scism and Arian Campo-Flores, - The Wall Street Journal
Stephan: I have been telling my readers for a decade to watch the insurance corporations because they pay close attention to what is happening with climate change, and when insurance rates start to skyrocket it is a clue that coastal real estate in those areas where rates are going up is in danger of provoking a real estate collapse and the loss of tens of billions of dollars of real estate value. Well, that prediction has come true.
Insurance is becoming less affordable and less available for Florida homeowners. Credit: The Wall Street Journal
MIAMI, FLORIDA — Florida’s property-insurance market is in trouble, as mounting carrier losses and rising premiums threaten the state’s booming real-estate market, according to insurance executives and industry analysts.
Longtime homeowners are getting socked with double-digit rate increases or notices that their policies won’t be renewed. Out-of-state home buyers who have flocked to Florida during the pandemic are experiencing sticker shock. Insurers that are swimming in red ink are cutting back coverage in certain geographic areas to shore up their finances.
Various factors are at play, insurance executives and analysts say. Two hurricanes that slammed the state—Irma in 2017 and Michael in 2018—generated claims with an estimated cost of about $30 billion. The cost of reinsurance, which insurers take out to cover some of the risk in the policies they sell, is swelling. Of particular concern, executives say, are excessive litigation over insurance claims and a proliferation of what insurers see as sham roof-related claims.
Stephan: Here is another take on the coming real estate collapse; this one on another part of the U.S. This real estate bomb is ticking away about to explode. If you own property in one of these threatened areas, I suggest you ask yourself: How much longer can we retain our invested value, when should we think about selling?
Citation: "The effect of information about climate risk on property values," published April 27 in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, was authored by Miyuki Hino, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and
Stanford University; and Marshall Burke, Stanford University
Homes in floodplains are floating on overvaluation. Credit: CarlosOsorio/AP
Single-family homes in U.S. flood plains are overvalued by a total of $43.8 billion, new research shows, highlighting the unsustainability of real estate markets in the face of escalating climate change. An estimated 3.8 million single-family homes are located in flood plains, meaning the average flood plain home is overvalued by more than $11,500, according to an April 27 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The overvaluation we find is really concerning, especially given the increases in climate risk that are coming our way,” said lead author Miyuki Hino, an environmental social scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The widespread overvaluation could represent a ticking time bomb for the millions of Americans whose assets are tied up in flood zone properties, which are concentrated, but not exclusively located, in coastal states. As sea levels rise, natural disasters worsen and flood insurance rates rise, these properties’ values could plummet.
Hino and her co-author, Marshall Burke of Stanford University, found that a single-family home being located in a flood plain does decrease its value by a little bit — but to a far lesser degree than it […]
Stephan: Here is yet another new approach to non-carbon energy. As I read these reports all I can think of is what would the world be like, would we have avoided climate catastrophe if, in 1973, Congress had listened to President Jimmy Carter and begun a serious transition out of the age of carbon energy instead of waiting nearly half a century.
A wavy, undulating solar panel building in the desert. Credit: Nudes
Designs of the future are increasingly centering on environmental impact as the effects of climate change start to reach world-historical levels. This means not only engineers, but architects and artists are exploring new and unprecedented ways of reimagining their work to minimize intrusion on the natural environment.
Burning Man is a well-known annual event that brings a lot of entrepreneurial people into the presence of artists, which makes the development of “Solar Mountain” assemblies to potentially power the 3,800-acre ranch of Burning Man with 318,645 kWh of power per year less of a stretch of the imagination.
And if the design is brought to completion, it could enable civil engineers and artists to reimagine the way we generate power for communities around the world, in an unprecedented wave of nature-oriented collaboration.
‘Solar Mountain’ could hint at the future of eco-friendly architecture
The new design incorporates a gigantic assortment of solar panels stretching down a gradient from a central spine. The architects behind the new project claim […]
Stephan: Here is one of the first exegetic reports I have read describing how badly government agencies forecast the transition out of the carbon era.
‘Solar is providing the cheapest energy the world has ever seen … It’s a fundamentally different world we’re moving into.’ Credit: Lukas Coch/AAP
In the year 2000, the International Energy Agency made a prediction that would come back to haunt it: by 2020, the world would have installed a grand total of 18 gigawatts of photovoltaic solar capacity. Seven years later, the forecast would be proven spectacularly wrong when roughly 18 gigawatts of solar capacity were installed in a single year alone.
Ever since the agency was founded in 1974 to measure the world’s energy systems and anticipate changes, the yearly World Energy Outlook has been a must-read document for policymakers the world over.
Over the last two decades, however, the IEA has consistently failed to see the massive growth in renewable energy coming. Not only has the organisation underestimated the take-up of solar and wind, but it has massively overstated the demand for coal and oil.
Jenny Chase, head of solar analysis at BloombergNEF, says that, in fairness to the IEA, it wasn’t alone.
Stephan: There are two problems with American Law enforcement, two reasons why the United States, on the basis of social outcome data, has the worst policing system amongst the democratic nations of the world. First, is the quality of the people who are hired. If you hire racist thugs and bullies is it any surprise they behave like racist thugs and bullies? Second, the way new hires are trained.
This article peels back the happy talk about police training that I keep reading from law enforcement agencies and reveals the truth about the kind of people hired to train new cops. When I read this article, particularly the comment by a police instructor who trains police departments across the nation, who tells trainees the best sex they will ever have is after killing a person, calling it a “perk of the job,” it made me want to puke.
David Grossman, who trains young cops to kill, and tells them they will have the best sex of the lives afterwards. Credit: The New Yorker.
The murders by cop go on – the latest, Lymond Moses, was asleep in his car – prompting furious calls for police reform from many weary of the carnage. Along with systemic racism, rabid militarization, fascist police unions, no accountability and infamously inadequate if not deranged training, we can thank messianic warrior-cop, uber fear-mongerer and “killology” expert Dave Grossman, a former Army ranger who for 20 years has traveled almost daily to every state in the blood-soaked union to offer popular police “trainings” to tell young acolytes they’re “the royalty of this land” – alas, a war zone of thugs and terrorists where they must learn to fight back with “righteous violence,” shoot first and think later, and per Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop, “make the threat die” – which, as the grim headlines remind us, they are, at a rate of roughly three a day. Since retiring from the Army in 1998 – video shows him in camo and face-paint shouting for “a symphony of death and destruction – […]
